Despite the pandemic and the associated recession, inflation has not completely disappeared, especially in the Seattle metropolitan area. This chart shows the month to month changes in the Seattle and All Cities "W" index from October 2019 to October 2020.
If you are in or soon entering bargaining, right now it is critical to be reviewing the month to month sales tax numbers, in a way that is has never been seen before.
Pushed down by the COVID Recession, the important June to June CPI number showed a dramatic, though expected, drop. We say “important” because many Washington public safety labor contracts are tied, directly or indirectly, to the June CPI numbers. As indicated in the recently released Guidebook on “Negotiation in Turbulent Times”, regardless of the CPI, we anticipate challenging bargaining in 2020 and into 2021. We are expecting most employers will at least start with 0% as their base wage proposal, and we’ve already seen one proposal for a -3%.
In the previous two articles in this wage series, we discussed the extent to which population and assessed valuation correlated with wage rankings. In this article, we discussed geographic location and the effect of various labor markets on public safety wages.
In the last issue we discussed whether – and to what extent — population influenced a jurisdiction's relative wage ranking. In this article we discussed to what extent assessed valuation influences that ranking.
In last three parts of the wage series we have discussed State wage rankings for the various public safety classifications. In the next part of the wage series we run our series of articles on factors that might influence or explain, at least in part, those wage rankings, with updated 2016 wage rankings.
This is part 6 of our continued series on Washington public safety employee wages. In this issue we report on wage rankings for 911 dispatchers and police records clerks.
This is Part 5 of our 10 Part 2016 Wage Series. In our last article, we covered Commissioned Deputy and Police Officer Wages. In this article, we turn to Firefighter and Corrections Officer Wages. We’ll cover Dispatcher and Records Clerk Wages in the next article.
In part 4 of our on-going wage series we now turn to the rankings of County Deputy and City Police Officer rankings throughout the State. This series always produces both expected and unexpected information about the relative standing of jurisdictions.
